In power electronics, driver circuits can be used to regulate current and/or voltage through components or other circuits. As an example, metal oxide field effect transistors (MOSFETs or FETs) can be used as output devices in many applications including amplifiers, power supplies, motor drivers, circuit breakers, power converters, active power filters, static synchronous compensator (STATCOM), flexible alternating current transmission system (FACTS) devices and solid-state transformers.
In general, driver circuits are composed of four major blocks, namely, a signal transfer circuit, a gate driving circuit, a protection circuit and a power circuit. To provide sufficient isolation (e.g., creepage distance) between the signal transfer circuit and the power circuit, the protection circuit can be configured with an isolation transformer that has a large magnetic core. Thus, existing driver circuits have a large footprint, are bulky and heavy. Furthermore, isolation transformers are known to have a common-mode (CM) parasitic capacitance coupling. This parasitic coupling, when introduced into the driver circuit, increases a susceptibility of the driver circuit to high common-mode dv/dt, which causes distortion in a gate drive voltage of the gate driving circuit, cross-talk between neighboring driver circuits and malfunction in upstream control circuits.